Eliot Shefler declined to face the camera for a photo. He claims close to 150,000 people have paid ... [+]
Elliot Shefler sits waiting in the lobby of a co-working office in London and immediately stands out from others around him. He’s not on his phone. As he starts to expound on the dark arts of targeted online tracking, you start to understand why.
“If I want to tell you a story,” he says, leaning back into his chair and staring through black-rimmed spectacles, “I can target you. I send you links. … I can show you articles against the war in Czechoslovakia, and there’s no war in Czechoslovakia. There’s not even a Czechoslovakia!”
Shefler is the Israeli-Turkish cofounder of The Spinner, a basic-looking website that sells a unique, online-manipulation service. Pay a flat $29 fee and it’ll surreptitiously show articles about going vegetarian, buying a dog or initiating sex (its most popular campaign) to whoever you want.
Two women used it subtly encourage a co-worker they disliked to quit their job.
Most articles appear in the random, eye-grabbing batch of headlines that populate the sidebars and foot of other articles via content platforms like Outbrain, Revcontent and Adblade. Around 30% percolate into a Facebook news feed. Some articles are several years old and seem to be straightforward advice features. The Spinner simply aggregates and sprinkles them across the sites a person browses.
Since its founding last April, around 146,000 people, mostly in the U.S. and Canada, have paid for the service, Shefler tells Forbes, showing a screenshot of his Google Analytics interface as evidence. The screenshot shows 168,000 users, but Shefler says the discrepancy comes from some people cancelling their transactions or being declined by a credit card company.
For all its quirkiness, The Spinner highlights how easy it can be in the age of fake news and social media to manipulate people on the Web. Cambridge Analytica did it. Advertisers and politicians do it. “Why not give this ability to the common man?” says Shefler, who wears loose-fitting jeans and refused to have his face shown in a photo.
Two women used it to subtly encourage a co-worker they disliked to quit their job, he says. Another tried to convince their sibling to sell a house they had just inherited. Rich Leigh, an author and founder of Radioactive PR, signed up for the service out of curiosity in July 2018.
He targeted the “initiate sex” campaign at himself as an experiment, and within two months started seeing articles like the following show up as suggested, sponsored posts in his Facebook news feed:
A screenshot of one of the articles that showed up in Rich Leigh's Facebook feed after he paid $29 ... [+]
The above article, which suggests using “I’m-in-the-mood” codewords such as “Honey, can you help me balance the checkbook later?” among its tips, was posted in 2011 on the website of monthly magazine Woman’s Day, published by Hearst. It was penned by one of the publication’s regular writers.
It was “incredibly weird,” Leigh told Forbes. He remembers seeing three or four other, similar articles in his news feed over the next month, and provided screenshots to two others that came from websites called FamilyShare.com and Shaunti.com.
Some customers want pricier, bespoke campaigns, says Shefler, like one man who tried to convince his wife that playing video games for about 10 hours a week was perfectly fine.
“Who will complain? You’re part of a conspiracy.”
Shefler, who refuses to give the name of his company for tax-related reasons, says the site has booked revenue of $5.1 million for 2018, but wouldn’t provide evidence to back up that claim. Shefler told Leigh in a recorded conversation for the PR consultant’s own online article, that he lived in Germany; but he denied this to Forbes, claiming to live in LA. He also would not give details of his previous work and doesn’t seem to have a social media presence or LinkedIn profile.
He does say that much of his career has been in online ads and online gambling. At its essence, The Spinner’s software lets people conduct a targeted phishing attack, a common approach by spammers who want to secretly grab your financial details or passwords. Only in this case, the “attacker” is someone you know. Shefler says his algorithms were developed by an agency with links to the Israeli military.
On his phone, Shefler shows what he says is a rogue link that a customer recently sent his wife. It points innocuously to a small, white cabinet on an online hardware store, but behind the scenes it also contains a string of code that adds a cookie to his wife’s phone.
Once clicked, she will start seeing articles from the “initiate sex” campaign like the ones sent to Leigh. The Spinner promises to show each human target approximately 10 articles, 180 times, over three months. Its service isn’t available to European users due to data privacy laws.
“Look, I don’t know if it works,” Shefler says, holding up his hands. “I have to deliver the articles. The exposures. I’m committed to give you 180 exposures to articles.” That approach won’t surprise anyone in advertising, an industry notorious for unclear outcomes, but Shefler says he can get away with it because his customers don’t want to engage with follow-up. “Who will complain? You’re part of a conspiracy.”
Cookies are just part of the furniture on the internet, and most of us habitually click the “OK” button when a website reminds us we’re being tracked. People continue to be shocked, though, by news about how much third parties track us through phones and laptops.
A recent story in The New York Times about how apps regularly monitor people’s geographic positions, for instance, prompted the city of L.A. to sue the Weather Channel app, owned by IBM, arguing that its local citizens had been misled about how their data would be used.
None of these concerns seem to bother Shefler, who sees the global online advertising market, worth roughly $250 billion according to Statista, as his playground. “Media is bought by brands trying to influence you to buy products,” he says. “[The] consumer-to-consumer advertising market [did] not exist a year ago.”
Shefler is chasing the growing revenues for digital advertising. A theoretical sub-market for C2C ... [+]
Down the line, Shefler would like to share what he knows about his customers with bigger advertisers. A woman who wants her boyfriend to propose would, for instance, be in close proximity to a potential customer of engagement rings. “She gave us that information, then she was kind enough to target that specific person and send him an email with a link,” he says of his hypothetical customer. “They’re doing all the work.”
Without missing a beat he points out that The Spinner is also a cause for good. “We have another campaign: Stop riding motorcycles. It’s cute right?” he asks, with a smirk. “We’re saving lives.”
